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With Alexa Blueprints, you can build Alexa skills without writing a single line of code. Whether you are a publisher, blogger, coach or ecommerce store, these skills can get you better engagement with your content, aid in customer service, and drive revenues and sales

Listen:

I don’t need to be a marketing oracle to tell you that you are not getting enough engagement, traffic, and clicks on your content.

Email CTRs are dipping, traffic to your blog isn’t making your heart sing, and even the numbers of likes and comments on your Instagram are not what they used to be.

You hear gurus and thought leaders tell you about writing MORE blog posts, sending more emails, posting videos everyday.

You nod, but the noise on these channels gives you pause, especially when you see a tweet like this:

Since you have mentioned one time set up fee I am assuming that you have an enterprise SaaS product.

I am also assuming that you will have a high touch sales model, in that there’s someone who will follow up with the lead during or after the trial period over email/Skype and answer questions related to set up.

Now, on a broad level, CAC= (Sum of all marketing and sales expenses)/ (Number of new customers)

Let’s look at the activities you will typically perform to get customers (in terms of both sales and marketing)

Tally up all the costs involved with all these activities for a fixed time period, and divide them by the number of new customers you have acquired in that same amount of time.

That will be your customer acquisition cost (that’s the easy way).

If you want to go more granular, track the costs associated with each marketing channel, with every affiliate partner, every sales associate etc.

For instance, you might discover in your website analytics that a well designed infographic which cost $500 sent you 10,327 visits to your home page. 10.3% signed up for a free trial, and out of that, 4% became paying customers.

The second approach involves setting up analytics, measurement and testing, all of which falls under conversion rate optimization but is worth it to get more insights and make corrections.

The thing with CAC, though is that the absolute number is meaningless.

You want to look at two numbers related to CAC (LTV is your life time value)

To know more about how to calculate these numbers and ratios I highly recommend these excellent articles by David Skok :

Unlike S.I units in hard sciences, there are new metrics invented all the time, with varying definitions.

Many of these metrics sound important but they are actually vanity metrics, like likes or shares.

They are good for the ego but they tell you absolutely nothing about the health of your SaaS startup.

To find out how well you know the critical SaaS metrics so that you can measure them and adjust your growth plan take this quiz.

It’s a tough one, unlike those “Which Harry Potter character are you?” quizzes.

But you will get to know whether you are the Yoda, John McClane, Frodo or Nemo of SaaS growth metrics.

It’ll be fun, I promise.

This quiz has a number of unfamiliar metrics. If you want to know more about them, or why a particular option was correct, download the key. It has case studies of how companies like Hubspot measure critical growth metrics, formulas for calculating many metrics, and links to authoritative resources on SaaS

F1 cars are made in labs by white coated mad scientists. NASCARs are knocked up in medieval foundries by men with mallets…NASCAR has hammers and spanners, an F1 driver can tune his car on the go…When an F1 driver brakes…his body is tormented by a force of 5g. Brake discs are made by firing carbon atoms at a cobweb of rayon…Over in NASCAR they make do with slabs of cast iron….if NASCAR is the Big Bang F1 is particle physics.

At its most fundamental level selling a SaaS product is the same whether to an individual or to an enterprise. You have to identify your ideal customer, demonstrate that you product has value, remove risk, and make it easy to use.

But when you get down to brass tacks the differences are akin to a NASCAR vs.F1 race.

You have a website up and running. You see traffic but no one clicks on the buy button or fills up the contact form. They land on a page, have a quick look around and then bounce, never to return.

And it’s doubly frustrating when you know you have a good product that is a proven problem solver.

Do you throw up your hands and become bitter, withdrawn and resentful?

No, you don’t. You get inspired by Nelson Mandela.

How to heal a bitterly divided country

In 1994 Mandela became the first black president of a country bitterly divided along racial lines . He knew that South Africa would be torn apart if reconciliation between the privileged white minority and the oppressed black majority didn’t happen.

As he transformed himself from a rebel to a statesman he decided, in the face of all opposition, to throw his weight behind the Springboks, the national rugby team that most blacks saw as the symbol of apartheid.

He promoted the rugby team as a South African team instead of an Afrikaner or a white team and enlisted the help of the captain Francois Pienaar, a big, blonde son of apartheid.

And against all odds, in the 1995 Rugby World Cup organized in South Africa, the Springboks won. The entire country erupted in celebrations and the slow process of reconciliation began.